Wed Jan 18 2006 -- Sweep 0.9.0 Released
=======================================
Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and
compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including
WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and
LADSPA effects plugins. Inside lives a pesky little virtual stylus
called
Scrubby who enjoys mixing around in your files.
This release is available as a source tarball at:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sweep/sweep-0.9.0.tar.gz?download
New in this release
-------------------
This release is the first in a new unstable series.
Changes include:
* sweep now uses gtk2 for it's interface
* improved mp3 detection and loading
* a new SVG icon for sweep (Alex Kloss)
* corrected a note to key mapping for pc keyboard playback (Paul
Brossier)
* an updated Spanish translation (Waldo Ramirez Montano)
* an updated Polish translation (Radoslaw Korzeniewski)
* more minor tweaks and improvements.
Release plans
-------------
This first release based on gtk2 begins what we hope will be a short
lived unstable series, leading up to the stable 1.0 release.
The priority will be ensuring that the gtk2 port really is complete
and bug free, but it's likely that a few important or useful new
features will be squeezed in.
Hopefully including:
* jack support
* simple file loading via drag and drop
* some form of LADSPA plugin browser (with bookmarks, search etc)
* modular drivers (no more hardcoded default)
When 1.0 is released, work will begin on what will become sweep 2.0.
this will be based around Conrad's libremix library and will enable
sweep
to perform on disk editing (removing the need to load entire files
into
memory), non destructive editing and much more besides.
Development news
----------------
The only significant change over 0.8.4 comes from the use of gtk2
for the interface. as such, you will now need gtk-2.0 (version 2.2.0 or
greater)
and it's dependencies to use sweep and the associated development
packages
to build sweep 0.9.0 from source.
gtk-2.0 can be found here:
http://www.gtk.org/
Or via your distribution's package system. (apt, rpm etc)
See here for information on accessing or contributing to sweep's
development code:
http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/development.html
You can find a nice overview of recent changes or report bugs
here:
http://trac.metadecks.org/sweep/
And of course, drop by our irc channel #sweep on irc.freenode.net and
you
can talk to us directly.
Further information
-------------------
Screenshots:
http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/screenshots/
Some interesting audio recordings of Scrubby are at:
http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/demos.html
Sweep is designed to be intuitive and to give you full control. It
includes
almost everything you would expect in a sample editor, and then some:
* precise, vinyl like scrubbing
* looped, reverse, and pitch-controlled playback
* playback mixing of unlimited independent tracks
* looped and reverse recording
* internationalisation
* multichannel and 32 bit floating point PCM file support
* support for Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Speex compressed audio files
* sample rate conversion and channel operations
* LADSPA 1.1 effects support
* multiple views, discontinuous selections
* easy keybindings, mouse wheel zooming
* unlimited undo/redo with fully revertible edit history
* multithreaded background processing
* shaded peak/mean waveform rendering, multiple colour schemes
Sweep is Free Software, available under the GNU General Public License.
More information is available at:
http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/
Thanks to Pixar Animation Studios and CSIRO Australia for supporting the
development of this project.
enjoy :)